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68 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/25/18 I Want To Be In The Scroll Where It Happens

  1. @Errolwi —

    Okay, now we’re all wondering just what exactly your ancestor did to get banished!

  2. @Hampus Eckerman,

    To me, “Durmstrang” always sounded like a spoonerism-like variant of “Sturm und Drang“; that phrase is German in origin, which to me suggested that Durmstrang might be located in an area where German is or was commonly spoken.

  3. @Chip

    @Andrew: wizards in posse, not in esse; as asked before, how would they get trained? I’m also doubting that a tenth of the population outside the South would be Black; ISTM that we’re not there even now, after a century or more of the north encouraging southern Blacks to immigrate.

    Powerful wizards seem to be dangerous even when untrained – Harry was setting animals free in zoos by accident before any training and Dumbledore’s sister was apparently very dangerous without training as well. “Tenth of the population” referred to the total population of the US – in 1860, about 10% of the US population was enslaved – but of course that population was mostly in the South. I agree that the northern population of enslaved/ex-enslaved people would have been much smaller.

  4. I found one article about the hippos more recent than 2016: https://www.euronews.com/2018/02/20/colombia-declares-war-on-pablo-escobar-s-hippos

    They know how to stop the hippos from reproducing; the problem is funding. Sterilizing one hippo cost 100 million pesos, which is about $33,300. Multiply that by 40 hippos and you’re looking at $1.25 million. Less if they manage to sterilize either all the male or all the female hippos (whichever sex works out to be cheaper and/or less dangerous to the people doing the work).

  5. Ryan H on September 26, 2018 at 7:03 pm said:

    The original Harry Potter books are the platonic ideal of Just-in-time world building. It had exactly enough world building to support the story/plot/characters exactly as it needed them. No more and no less. And it has never stretched or expanded very well. As soon as you start poking it the seams start showing.

    Yeah, but Lois McMaster Bujold worldbuilds like that, too. She only figures out what she needs for this plot and the rest is in the nebulous “Schrodinger’s plot box” as she calls it. To coalesce into actual plot/worldbuilding when the box is opened for later books.

    And her worldbuilding, while certainly problematic in places, is leaps and bounds better than Rowlings.

  6. @Contrarius

    Speaking of slavery, I’ve been doing genealogy research lately and just this evening came across a record of one of my ancestors apportioning out his deceased father’s slaves as part of the father’s probate settlement back in the mid-1700s.

    I remember being shocked when I learned that a large, empty area in the middle of the family cemetery was where the slaves were buried.

  7. @Andrew: (replying to myself): It occurs to me that Dumbledore’s sister, Ariana, became very dangerous because of physical abuse from muggles before she had any magical training, which is an indication of what might result from the enslavement of wizards and witches.

  8. But I have to admitt that I was 100% sure from the books that Durmstrang Institute was placed somewhere in Russia and was totally chocked when I read on the Harry Potter Wikia that it was placed in Sweden or Norway. Even more stupid, russia seems to have its own school – Koldovstoretz. Have all scandinavians been run out of their country? What has happened?

    I thought that Durnstran had a Ruritanian* feel about, placing it somewhere in the Danube/Balkans region – never seemed particularly Scandinavian to me.

    *that may have to do with a recent viewing of the 1922 version of Prisoner of Zenda, featuring the fabulously-named Snitz Edwards.

    Bujold IMHO can get away with Just-In-Time world building since she’s dealing multiple planets in her Vorkosigan series, and that leaves a lot of room for growth: it seems less making it up on the spot and more fleshing out a nebulous outline. Whatever, I always felt Barryar had a proper lived-in look. Rowling on the other hand was trying to superimpose her magical society on a real place, which left a lot of the holes exposed. (How do wizards get their food, since it’s stated in one of the books that they can’t magic it up? What do Hogwarts graduates who don’t work for the Ministry of Magic or Hogwarts do? Who makes up the underclass of wizard bus drivers and merchants – are these the children of wizards who don’t make the grade?)

    WRT American wizards, Rowling’s version (like a lot of US history school texts) seems to overlook the non-British parts of history. Even ignoring Native American communities, Santa Fe was a thriving settlement while the English at Jamestown were still trying to figure out which end of the plow went into the ground, and well before the Puritans arrived. Not to mention the large French-influenced region stretching along the St. Lawrence river and into the Mississippi basin and points west. Until the late 1700s, the British settlements were just a thin strip along the Atlantic coast .

  9. @Darren Garrison: that was interesting, but I think they were overselling (at least) their case by the same sort of blurring they complain about; evolution is incompatible with Biblical literalism (ska “Fundamentalism”), but not even all of Christianity has that as a tenet.

  10. @Contrarius: Okay, now we’re all wondering just what exactly your ancestor did to get banished!

    Fairly mundane – publishing pamphlets ranting about the ‘yellow peril’. I guess if you did it often enough in an obnoxious enough way you actually could suffer consequences. Apparently he was also a tightwad.

  11. On slave wizards – while there are some Muggle born wizards, the vast majority seem to come from wizarding families. Assuming African wizards used their powers to keep from being enslaved, there would be a very low number of slave wizards born, low enough that they could disappear at 11 without getting noticed.

  12. @Darren, what Chip said. I’m certainly a Christian who accepts the truth of evolution by natural selection. I’m a theist, not a deist, so I don’t believe in godly intervention, and I also understand Biblical stories as intended to teach lessons rather than to be historical. (Insert rant here about counting blessings, or thanking God for good results, when we know perfectly well that bad things happen to good people and vice versa, and that poor and oppressed people do not deserve their situations. Ain’t God making those things happen.)

  13. @bookworm1398, it hurts to remember why, but slaves didn’t stay purely African for long. So there would have been plenty of wizards in the next generation, and more still in the third.


    Well, Durmstrang Institute was created in 1294 during the time of the Hanseatic League, so I guess the merchants at least would know a bit of german. But commonly spoken? And there’s still no explanation of why all students and teachers of Durmstrang have russian or slavic names. The only swedish/norwegian/danish name seems to have been that of the second headmaster, Harfang Munter.

  15. @Lenore Jones: I have the impression that wizards have little connection with mundane power; how many would have been plantation owners, or overseers? And is wizardry dominant? ISTM that if so everyone would be a wizard in short order.

  16. @Chip, both excellent questions. On the first, I don’t know if wealthy American wizards would have stuck with house elves or enslaved other humans. On the second, I suspect wizardry genetics is one of those unexplored world-building issues. It’s canon that some wizards arise from muggle parents, which implies strange things about the genetics. If it comes from a mutation, it must be dominant, or muggle-born wizards would be vanishingly rare. If it is recessive, that implies that a certain percentage of the muggle population carries the wizard gene(s) heterozygously. And what about squibs?

    More likely wizardry is passed on in some non-genetic fashion. In which case, who knows what happens when populations mix?

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